notanotherbookreview

"Wortsman displays a savage descriptive edge, precise and crucial, that is as natural as it is canonically reminescent of the panEuropean urbanism of such writers as Robert Walser and Robert Musil" --Anthony Abbott in  American Bookseller "Wortsman hang(s) with the masters....Dozens of dangling avalanches for people with dreamer's block."--A. Scott  Campbell,  The Boston Phoenix "A fantastic book....Marvelous writing, wonderful craft; and the breath of imagination....(Wortsman) succeeded so well in his craft and art that it reads 'artless' and'spontaneous,' which to me is the highest of compliments.--"Herbert Selby, Jr., author of  L ast Exit to Brooklyn. We have more time to think and seek meanings in our Covid lives. Consider Peter Wortsman's words.  He creates strange universes of human life we think we know, and shows them singular in ways we might never have imagined. Peter Wortsman is the author of novels, books...

Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan, published by Farrar Straus Giroux, is a very smart novel that pits new technologies against old (think Google vs, Name of the Rose) and in the process, it examines what language tells us about meanings.  Is our consciousness transformed by the medium? Marshall Mcluhan, sage of communication, believed the medium is the message and that technology is the content. In Don DeLillo’s The Names, clashing languages form a furious Tower of Babel. Sloan has similar questions about the language of technology and how it’s shape shifting us in the 21 st century. But that may be his next, darker book. Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore is an entertaining mystery wrapped in a love for the miraculous tools of our 21 st century technological genius. Language, code, is the heart of this mystery, which begins in a strange bookstore of unreadable books. Clay Jannon, web site designer, is desperate after being laid off from his job. He’s walki...